Tuesday, October 3, 2017

FRANKLIN EXPEDITION - AGAIN

3 October 2017: I know - we're beating this story to death! But new facets keep popping up and in our opinion, they are worthy of sharing..... Unless something REALLY big appears, I promise this will be the last of the Erebus/Terror/Franklin posts for a while. Until it isn't! So, this piece is more an editorial on the subject written by a Canadian and gives a more personal perspective on these ships and the men who died in the ice of the Arctic. It provides an interesting view from the perspective of the indigenous people who seems to have a claim to the wrecks and artifacts. With a nod and thanks to Bob Weber of the Canadian Press, we offer the final (maybe) story on the Franklin Expedition...

GJOA HAVEN , Nunavut -- Full fathom
five John Franklin's ship lies and of its bones are stories made.

With apologies to William
Shakespeare, few shipwreck tales have seen as much sea-change as that of the
HMS Erebus. The tug of war over how Franklin history is told is almost as rich
and strange as the story itself.

"There is a set of facts. Those
men all died," says Adriana Craciun, a Boston University professor who has
written extensively on portrayals of the doomed expedition.

"But there's never just one
Franklin disaster."

Franklin's ships Erebus and Terror
set out from England in 1845 with 129 men to search for the Northwest Passage,
but they never returned.

A message found in 1859 by a search
vessel said both ships were trapped in ice in late 1846 and remained so for
about 18 months. It added that in April 1848, 105 survivors headed out on foot.
None survived.

After it became clear the expedition
had gone badly wrong, 19th-century Victorians painted Franklin and his men as
heroes, says Craciun.

"They were martyrs to
science."

Searchers, such as John Rae, who
brought back unsavoury tales of cannibalism were harshly criticized. Rae
suffered significant harm to his career for suggesting British gentlemen would
stoop so low.

In the next century, the narrative
gradually changed. Franklin became an example of imperial arrogance by refusing
to learn from the local people, suffering and dying miserably as a result.

As the new millennium arrived,
Franklin morphed again, into avatar of Canadian Arctic sovereignty.

"At a time when international
interest in the Arctic region is growing, finding this Franklin ship bolsters
Canada's claim to Arctic sovereignty," said then-prime minister Stephen
Harper in 2014 after the Erebus was located.

Harper called Franklin "a great
Canadian story" and said the ship's discovery was "a great day in
mapping the history of our country."

It wasn't that different a view of
Franklin than that held by the Victorians, says Craciun. It simply altered the
cause for which Franklin died.

"There was a serious political
use," Craciun says. "(Harper's Conservatives) were trying to sanitize
and romanticize (the wreck) and make it the foundation of a national Arctic
sovereignty.

"It transforms a complex human
and political and colonial event into something that can be celebrated in a
rather simplistic and destructive way."

Now, Franklin is becoming a
different kind of Canadian story. He's being seen through the eyes of the Inuit
as another in a number of European explorers, traders and whalers.

"I first started hearing
stories as far as I start remembering, maybe age six or seven," says Inuit
historian Louie Kamookak, who's been collecting Inuit oral history and
cross-referencing it with journals and logbooks for 30 years.

get back. The ships were never
found.

"That's when my grandmother's
stories started linking to a teacher that was talking about the same people. As
I got older, I started interviewing elders asking elders about stories. That's
when it all started."

The Inuit have detailed accounts of
European visits going back to Martin Frobisher in the 1500s. Enough expeditions
ended in shipwreck to cause the Inuit to change their travel and trading
patterns to take advantage of the scarce wood and metal resources the sites
offered.

"The Netsilik Inuit may have
extended their territory to the southwest to take advantage of the Franklin
wrecks," says Parks Canada archeologist Ryan Harris.

"It's true not just of these
ships. The Copper Inuit (further west) all of a sudden had a resource base that
really gave them a strong advantage in trading."

Kamookak's own
great-great-grandfather had a Franklin dinner knife that he turned into an ice
chisel.

Kamookak welcomes the new openness
to Inuit oral history.

"Inuit are more involved.
They're a lot happier to be involved (rather) than seeing people come up
searching with no contact with the Inuit ... and the Inuit are kind of back
stage, watching."

Some Inuit groups even maintain
their land claim gives them ownership of the Franklin ships.

Inuit history is also generous to
Franklin.

Kamookak says the years in which the
expedition was lost were so tough the Inuit themselves fled the region where
the ships were found.

"When Franklin was here it was
a bad year," he says. "There are stories about the ice not thawing
out and the Inuit having to move for survival. It was very hard for Franklin's
men to get help from the Inuit."

Franklin was a skilled explorer who
followed his orders from the Royal Navy to the letter, says Marc-Andre Bernier,
Parks Canada's head underwater archeologist. He says it wasn't Franklin's fault
they took him into the most ice-choked part of the Arctic in years of especially
bad ice.

"I think his reputation needs
to be rehabilitated."

Craciun welcomes the more nuanced
understanding of Franklin.

"You have multiple, overlapping
claims by different governmental and non-governmental groups, and that's new.
To some extent, (Inuit) groups are trying to re-indigenize those ships, those
spaces, those histories and fold them into a larger Indigenous history."

~~~~~~~~~~~

So, while the artifacts from these wrecks are displayed in England, the Canadians feels short changed (and perhaps they are!) because the display was not done in Canada before England. And the Inuit have a totally different claim, saying their rights have been trampled. You know there will be more on this - after all, there will be no more diving the wrecks until next spring/summer and folks will be lining up to add fuel to this fire. Stay tuned (but it won't be for a while!)